Thursday evening at Microsoft Tech Ed North America 2012 in Orlando, FL. Cisco’s UCS Manager was awarded the Breakthrough Technology Award in the annual Best of Tech Ed Awards ceremony. This year companies submitted 260 submissions for Best of Tech Ed consideration. These were narrowed down to 46 finalists in 15 categories. The Breakthrough Technology Product award can be thought of as the ‘Best of the Best’ and showcases leading product innovation. Microsoft Tech Ed North America is Microsoft’s largest IT Professional conference with over 10,000+ attendees.

Here are the Judges comment on UCS Manager: “This year’s winner of our Breakthrough Technology award is Cisco’s USC Servers and UCS Server Manager. Cisco UCS Manager provides complete programmability for all low-level hardware, BIOS, and configuration settings for Cisco UCS Servers, enabling them to be quickly deployed, cloned, and managed—even remotely. Cisco’s USC Servers can also be fully managed using PowerShell or System Center Orchestrator.

Visit the Cisco Developer Network to learn about and download UCS PowerTool, the Microsoft PowerShell command line interface to UCS. UCS PowerTool helps you integrate, automate, and orchestrate all aspects of UCS management including network, storage and hypervisor management.

This is the second year in a row for Cisco technology to be recognized in the Best of Tech Ed Awards as last year our B series offering won the hardware category.

As many of you know, a big part of the UCS story revolves around the flexibility we’ve built into the UCS management model. While we hear great feedback from customers about the native UCS management GUI, we know that many of you have already invested lots of time in building automated solutions to repetitive IT tasks. To that end, we want to help you find ways to use the tools and processes that have already been built along side of UCS.

We know that many of our customers are already running Microsoft applications on top of UCS. For many of you, that means that you’re also likely automating repetitive tasks using Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language. PowerShell is an immensely powerful tool in an IT admin’s bag of tricks. Introduced back in 2006, it has matured to become common across not only Microsoft’s business software, but also among their partner community – including NetApp, Quest Software, and even VMWare.

Shortly after we brought UCS to market, we got a specific request from an early adopter to build out PowerShell support for UCS . Here on the team, nothing moves us faster than feedback directly from our customers, so it got the cogs turning and we’re happy to announce our first public release of the PowerShell Management Toolkit for UCSM. We decided to even take that a step farther – besides providing PowerShell support, we’ve also made available .NET managed code that can be used to natively build UCS support into a .NET application. For the rest of the post, I’m going to spend some time talking about some of the nifty ways in which UCS PowerShell provider can be used. Fair warning here, folks – we’re about to get technical

Microsoft TechEd 2011 was a great opportunity to talk to customers about Cisco UCS and Microsoft applications. We had so many attendees come by the booth and ask questions about UCS that we meet out target goal of customer engagments within the first two days. I was surprised how many people did not realize the depth of the platform or the integration points we provide from both an application and consolidation standpoint.

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